By Joey Clavette
Back in October, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report named “China’s Nightmarish Citizen Scores are a Warning for Americans.” The information therein went viral on blogs and news outlets — “China is developing a totalitarian citizen scoring system!” But news outlets from Asia, such as Tech in Asia responded that the ACLU had made some mistakes. The truth is that the People’s Republic of China’s central banking system authorized a few private companies to start pilot projects for a national credit system planned for 2020. China has never had a credit system like we have, and so it’s imperative to start one.
The ACLU and many Western media outlets incorrectly reported that the Tencent, Alibaba and official government credit systems were the same thing. Tencent is an investment company that decided to utilize mined social media content in order to evaluate users. Officially, their algorithms are meant to test for “trustworthiness.” Users who receive high scores are rewarded with incentives like free high-speed wifi at Beijing’s main airport. Chinese media outlet Caixin actually reported that the central bank was very annoyed with this credit system. Alibaba is sort of like Paypal and Amazon, so they have a lot of information about people’s purchasing history. Using this information, they established an algorithm to calculate an individual’s scores. This score can be, and is, shared on social media sites. Users can even play a game where they guess their friend’s scores.
If you mixed up the two score systems, it would sound frightening, especially if you added in ideas like political obedience being measured and your score being lowered by having friends with low scores, as the ACLU reported. It says something about our own media and culture that we jumped to such conclusions.
In the West, we too have corruption and surveillance. Yet when it happens here, it is often seen as out of the norm or something merely leading to the corruption of our values. When it is seen happening in the People’s Republic of China, it is presumed that they are already plunged into totalitarian corruption and that corruption is the rule rather than the exception.
Here in Ottawa, we recently built a one billion dollar spy centre on Ogilvie for Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), Canada’s spy agency. We know that our spy agencies are utilizing the Five Eyes program, an amalgamation of English-speaking nations’ spy agencies, which supersede privacy laws by trading information with each other. Yet we do not look at ourselves as living in a totalitarian surveillance state. We have services everywhere that reward us for being good consumers, the frugality of PC points, the freedom of Air Miles!, the guilty-pleasure-rewarding Starbucks card… Yet we don’t typically view ourselves as mindless consumers at the whims of private companies.
We seem to know little more about the People’s Republic of China other than that it has had, and continues to have, human rights issues, that its “democracy” is shaky, there is poverty, corruption and exploitation. But we also experience those things. However, we know more about our own country than just that. To combat this ignorance, we need to hear more about the People’s Republic of China. We don’t hear nearly enough about China’s wonderful gardens, architecture, philosophy, love stories, markets, film, literature and everything else that makes it a rich culture, worthy of pride.
This article first appeared in the Leveller Vol. 8 No. 4 (Jan/Feb 2016).
